Hunting Mania Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Not one for animal lovers.

Most people are too old to remember the NES game Duck Hunt. It was one of those games everyone wanted to play as you shoot ducks using a light gun. For those under 30, an NES was a Nintendo Entertainment System, which was a massive 8 bit back in those days. Anyway, I remember playing Duck Hunt at a mates house and after a while we got bored and ran around using the light guns pretending to be spies.

Hunting Mania is of a similar vein. There are animals roaming around. Some you have to shoot, some you have to protect. Don't worry though, Billy Bob, your mentor (no mention of a surname) is there to guide you. And if you prove to have sufficient skill, he might just retire and leave the huntin' to you. Graphics and sound are ok, but nothing special. And on some levels, it can be a bit tricky to see what animals you're looking at in the background.

It's a simple game. Move the cursor around and then press the main button to shoot. There are a variety of creatures, locations and weapons. Sounds good right? Well, not so much. First thing you notice is that the gun is all over the place and there's no diazepam here to help you. After you get used to the slight shakiness of the gun and you correct for this in your shots, you will probably start hitting things.

A head, neck or heart shot is enough to kill, anything else and the animals are wounded and will flee. But not just them, usually all the other animals around them too. Although sometimes, even though you can use a shot to scare a creature out from behind a bush or rock (i.e. get it running), the shot seems to have no effect at all. Which is a bit weird.

As is the accuracy of the shooting. Now I consider myself a bit of a marksman in both gaming and real life (I'm always the sniper on FPS games and had a pretty decent run at laser clay pidgeon shooting). So when I shoot, I shoot to kill. It's head shots only if I can help it and often I get them. But strangely, other times when I have the head dead centre in my sight, the game registers a flesh wound. Very strange.

So I have had to get accustomed to hitting things on the run and believe me, this takes some skill also. You have to compensate for the distance, but you soon get the hang of it. Until again, like the head shots, you swear you hit them, but it doesn't seem to register. Which makes me think the hitbox coding is a bit weird and can appear very random at times. Not great for a game which is about sharpshooting.

Also a bit strange is the fact that between the shooting you have to drive your jeep to the actual locations which seems pointless to me. It wastes time and often, although Bob tells you there are creatures there, they either take forever to come out, or they just don't. Again wasting valuable time and believe me this game is very time pressured. There have been many levels I've had to replay again and again due to the fact that even though I took out most of my quota pretty quickly, finding the rest was the hard part.

These niggly details detract quite significantly from what is a basic, yet enjoyable game. Ok, some might say that wasting time in finding the creatures and waiting for them to show is part of the difficulty curve and replaying levels again a few times gives the game longevity. But I disagree. To be faffing around with driving, waiting for creatures which aren't always there, and having a bit of a dodgy gun in terms of accuracy was more frustrating than enjoyable.

Still, some of you may like it even if I didn't.